I love food: recipes, restaurants, etc. This blog is about sharing the food I love and having others share theirs with me.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Food Pet Peeves

We all have them. Food pet peeves. Little quirks, faux pas & idiosyncrasies that OTHER people do in regard to food & eating that irritate us to the very core. Surely we do not possess any such annoying traits ourselves!!

Near the top of my little food pet peeves list is picky eaters. And not picky in the way you would normally assume. But more on that in the next post. That one deserves it’s very own little acknowledgment.

Other food pet peeves:

-Trying to sneak/hide an ingredient in a dish. My mother constantly did this to my husband early on in our relationship. She couldn’t quite grasp his hatred of cheese. And she knew he tolerated mozzarella fine. So she’d take advantage of his good nature & innocence, trading white cheddar for mozzarella and trying to play it off. Jake got wise to her trickery, though. And to this day, whenever he’s unsure of a dish’s ingredients (no matter the cook), he lets me take a bite first, then inquires with plaintive eyes and waits for my nod. I know the cheese thing is hard, friends, and probably when you hear that Jake hates cheese the only recipes that you can think of contain loads & loads of melty, cheesy goodness. But it’s just provoking my husband to give the “I’m just not that hungry” response at some point in the dinner. Pizza, folks. Just order a pizza & we’ll all be fine. As long as it only has mozzarella on it! Otherwise we might have to grate anchovies into the next meal we drop off at your door. Just sayin’. (And, yes, cream cheese counts as cheese.)

-Spouting off how many calories / carbs / fat grams are in every. single. menu item. I get it. You’re health conscious. Much more than me. You win!! However, I probably have better taste. And am enjoying my food more than you are. Just sayin’.

-Hidden ingredients. Can’t food just be made of real ingredients & not weird chemical concoctions? Just what is “autolyzed yeast extract” anyway? And why do I need it in my rice pilaf mix? I have a friend whose adolescent daughter has started helping her grocery shop & if a product has any ingredient that she doesn’t understand or recognize, they put it back on the shelf. I promise you, that will cut out a whole lot of stuff from your pantry! One of my favorite things is looking on a package of frozen vegetables and seeing under the ingredients list just “green beans”. Or “corn”. Nothing else. Awesome. Does that make anyone else a little sad, though? That it’s awesome? That it’s a surprise at all?!

I’m sure there are many, many more. What are some of your food pet peeves?

2 comments:

You've mentioned this before but it troubles me enough to put mention it among pet peeves. I hate raisins. Fortunately for me, our mother did too and did not attempt to sneak them into any meals.

Not much ruins a delicious food for me faster than adding raisins to it. It might be similar to eating watermelon. The rest of the dish might be great but I don't care enough about picking through the food to dig out the raisins (or spit them out when I taste them) to continue eating it. This goes for cinnamon rolls (no business being associated with raisins), bread puddings, and even oatmeal cookies (I will concede that the oatmeal raisin cookie may be a staple but they're fine without them - or add CHOCOLATE CHIPS!).

Please add Weight Watchers point counters to the list! The ones that let you know they made this recipe and it has "x" amount of points in it. Congratulations. You know how to cook and annoy people at the same time!!!